BL 

ZvtQ 
.3+51 



l«K " : - : ;>' 



II 111 ! iii&iii ^^^KM%^t#ifiM^ : - ^^iftiilliSii^Sift 



■•-'"•:•. ■■ - 
■■•V- -,. v., .. . 



ai l gjjlW 



— 




■ 






.. :,-.,..' ..., . \\\\v> ... ■■:■■ ... .-.■. .-. , . • ■. ■ v.^wv. :.■:■. . 



Hf^gHg ^/tv^fe 



J LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. I 
# * 



X UNITED STATES OP AMERICA, f 



RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 



RELIG-ION AND SCIENCE 



IN THEIR RELATION TO 



PHILOSOPHY. 



AN ESSAY ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE 
SCIENCES. 



Read before the Philosophical Society of Washington, 



CHARLES W. SHIELDS, D. D., 

PROFESSOR OF THE HARMONY OF SCIENCE AND REVEALED RELIGION, 
IN PRINCETON COLLEGE, N. J. # 



'- 






NEW YORK: 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, AND COMPANY. 

1875. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 

Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



IZ- tt]Z0 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



r 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The following essay was prepared originally as a paper 
to be read before the Philosophical Society of Washington, 
under the title of " The Present State of the Sciences," 
and with the understanding that it would traverse in a philo- 
sophical spirit the ground occupied by the recent Address 
of Dr. Tyndall to the British Association at Belfast. 

Numerous requests for it in a more permanent form hav- 
ing been received since its publication by the " New York 
Tribune " for November the 7th ult., the author has taken 
the opportunity to revise it and insert some additional 
matter which could not be brought within the limits of the 
original occasion. No attempt, however, has been made to 
unfold the themes presented, as it is his hope to treat of them 
in an extended work, projected since the year 1860, and 
designed to exhibit the Harmony of Science and Revealed 
Religion as fundamental and preliminary to the Final Phi- 
losophy or Theory of Perfectible Science. 
Princeton College, February, 1875. 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL 
SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



Prof. Joseph Henry, LL. D., President, in the Chair. 

At a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Washing- 
ton, held October 24th, 1874, a paper was read by the Rev. 
Dr. C. W. Shields of Princeton College, " On the Present 
State of the Sciences." 

On motion the thanks of the Society were presented to 
Rev. Dr. Shields, arid the hope was expressed that his essay 
might be widely circulated. — Extract from the Minutes. 

J. H. C. Coffin, Secretary. 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE 
SCIENCES. 



It should be premised that this essay will 
embrace but a small part of an immense field. 
It can claim to be nothing more than a mere 
glimpse of the existing state of the sciences 
from a philosophical point of view, and will 
simply aim to bring forward certain general 
principles which are believed to be already 
latent in many thoughtful minds and of special 
interest at the present time. 

On a careful review of the history of the 
sciences, it could be shown that each of them, 
since the Reformation, has broken into two 
sections, the one mainly scientific and the other 
largely religious, and that these two sections, 
in parting from each other, have proceeded 
through three distinct stages, more or less suc- 
cessive and chronological. The first might be 
termed a stage of healthful separation and prog- 
ress, marked by ascertained facts and truths ; 
the second, a stage of mutual avoidance, filled 



8 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

with various hypotheses and dogmas ; and the 
third, a stage of open rupture, issuing in an- 
tagonistic speculations and creeds. It would 
be interesting to test this generalization by- 
tracing the sciences from one stage to another 
during the last three centuries, together with 
the discoveries, opinions, and controversies 
which have marked their career. Indeed it is 
plain that without some such review of the 
past growth of knowledge, we can neither un- 
derstand its present state nor forecast its future 
progress. The history of the sciences can alone 
lead us to what Whewell and Comte have termed 
their philosophy — that Science of the Sciences 
which the sciences themselves must yield as 
their last and noblest fruitage. On this occa- 
sion, however, some acquaintance with such 
history may be assumed, and it will be enough 
to present the results which have been drawn 
from it, and leave them to stand upon their 
own evidence. 

Let us define the field before us. Leaving 
out of view those portions of knowledge which 
have attained to scientific certainty and are no 
longer in debate, those discovered facts and 
laws which alone make positive science, we 
shall find remaining to be considered a mass of 
unsolved problems, mostly questions of origin 
and destiny, which are growing more complex 
every hour, and before which the religious and 






THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 9 

scientific champions of our day are now cross- 
ing lances, like the two knights before the 
mystic shield, with their respective dogmas and 
hypotheses in a more or less contradictory state. 
It will be our first task to survey the opposite 
sides or phases of these questions as expressed 
in such dogmas and hypotheses, from an inde- 
pendent point of view, in a strictly philosophi- 
cal mood, with an effort to do each of them the 
utmost justice. We shall then have the ma- 
terials for a full and fair decision. 

ASTRONOMICAL* PROBLEMS. 

Astronomy — to begin with the oldest of the 
concrete sciences — still offers to the two parties 
that ever present problem which has tasked our 
race for thousands of years, the origin of the 
heavens, the production of those mysterious 
bodies, the sufi, planets, and satellites, the 
stars, galaxies, and nebulae which fill the im- 
mensity of space around us. On the one side 
of this question we have the hypothesis of uni- 
versal evolution, of the spontaneous growth of 
worlds out of crude matter by means of its own 
laws from an indefinite antiquity and immen- 
sity ; in a word, the rise of the present cosmos 
from a former chaos. It is an hypothesis as old 
as the days of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epi- 
curus, who held that the original atoms, strug- 
gling together throughout space and time, have 



10 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

at last, after infinite trials, brought forth the 
existing worlds as the fittest to survive their 
mazy conflict. And though it slumbered dur- 
ing the early and middle ages, until it was re- 
vived by Bruno, Gassendi, and others, in the 
seventeenth century, it has since come forth 
again with renewed vigor and in still more 
scientific forms. Descartes led the way, de- 
voutly assuring the Sorbonne that the worlds 
were no doubt created perfect, while, never- 
theless, he would show how they might have 
arisen on mechanical principles from certain 
vortices or vast eddies of different matter form- 
ing and whirling the sun and planets like boats 
in a maelstrom. Leibnitz, in place of the vor- 
tices, put the monads or living atoms acting 
and reacting under preestablished harmonies 
until they evolved the present solar system as 
the best possible world. Immanuel Kant, ap- 
plying the physics of Newton, sketched a 
natural history of the celestial bodies as at 
first massed out of a stormy chaos of attractive 
and repulsive particles, then formed into re- 
volving globes, and finally poised in the equi- 
librium of the planetary forces. Laplace at 
length completed such views with his magnifi- 
cent postulate of a primitive nebula, or uni- 
versal fire-mist, eddying into a central igneous 
body like the sun, breaking into rotating rings 
such as those of Saturn, cooling into cloudy 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 11 

and watery spheres such as Jupiter and Nep- 
tune, and at last hardening into solid shells 
such as that which incrusts the fiery core of 
our earth. The elder Herschel pushed this 
sublime speculation with the telescope beyond 
our solar firmament into the sidereal heavens, 
where he detected, as he supposed, vast nebu- 
lous masses with lucid points glittering as the 
nuclei of new worlds, or rather of ancient 
worlds so remote that ages must yet pass ere 
the tardy light can paint their finished form in 
the eye of man. Humboldt, in view of such 
researches, grandly described the whole celes- 
tial spectacle as only in appearance simultane- 
ous, having beyond it an endless perspective of 
stars and galaxies too distant to be portrayed 
as yet in other than their embryo stages, as 
mere films and dots of light. Other authori- 
ties still living might be cited who hold or 
use the same hypothesis, and it is now claimed 
that the spectroscope has raised it to the rank 
of a theory by exhibiting in the chemical con- 
stitution of different stars all the successive 
phases of cosmic growth, nebula, sun, and 
planet, as plainly bursting into life throughout 
the heavens, as the germ, leaf, and flower at 
our feet. 

On the other side of the question we have 
the dogma of immediate creation, of an in- 
stantaneous starting forth of the heavens and 



12 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

earth from nothing in their present form, at 
the mere word of Jehovah. It is a dogma 
which claims to be as old as the Hebrew and 
Christian Scriptures, and in various terms has 
been formulated and handed down to us by the 
rabbis, the fathers, the schoolmen, the reform- 
ers, and the divines of the following age. Philo, 
the Platonic Jew, in agreement with the Mac- 
cabees, held that the worlds were not formed 
from anything preexistent, but spoken into 
being from nothing. Clement of Alexandria, 
in opposition to the Epicureans, delighted to 
represent the creation of the universe as a 
voluntary act of Divine love. Augustine more 
precisely taught that the Deity fashioned the 
heavens and earth not out of matter, nor yet 
out of himself, but out of nothing, by an in- 
staneous exertion of His own free will. Aquinas 
followed with the scholastic distinction that 
God from eternity willed that the world should 
be, and not that the world should be from 
eternity — that He created with it both space 
and time, and that He was the author of matter 
rather than its mere former. Melancthon, in 
contrast with the Stoical notion of eternal 
matter, designated the creative act as a simple 
fiat, commanding things to be which had not 
been before. Calvin stigmatized as a profane 
jeer the inquiry why the heavens and earth 
should have been created only six thousand 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 13 

years ago, after so many idle ages had rolled 
away and with so much vacant space left run- 
ning to waste. The great body of living di- 
vines following these different authorities in 
the Jewish, Greek, Roman Catholic, and Prot- 
estant Churches, still teach or confess the same 
dogma, and at this hour, while the telescope 
and spectroscope are disclosing unnumbered 
worlds throughout infinite space and time, it 
stands defined in the same terms as when the 
heavens were but admired as a blue canopy or 
a spangled vault. 

Let it here be noted, once for all, that the 
hypotheses and dogmas which are held respect- 
ing scientific questions are now coming before 
us in their pure and simple form, without any 
admixtitre with each other, and as enunciated 
by the highest authorities. Among astronomers, 
as well as divines, it need scarcely be said, may 
be found many, such as the elder Herschel and 
Stephen Alexander, who seek to blend the 
theory of evolution with the doctrine of crea- 
tion in their cosmogonic speculations, as well as 
some, such as Laplace and Humboldt, who 
would put them apart or at variance ; but such 
classes do not now come within this survey. 

Besides the origin of the heavens, the ques- 
tion of their destiny, so long a mere theme of 
devout fancy, is becoming also a problem of 
exact science. It was taught by all the great 



14 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

doctors, poets, and artists, from the days of 
Clement, Bernard, and Michael Angelo, that 
the whole existing firmament might at any mo- 
ment be destroyed and renewed by the flames 
of a general conflagration in order to become 
the pure abode of saints and angels ; and even 
since the rise of astronomical conceptions, the 
comet, the meteor, and the aurora have ever 
and anon been hailed as portents of judgment 
and signs of the approaching kingdom of heav- 
en. But we are now assured, on the authority 
of leading physicists, such as Grove, Helm- 
holtz, and Tyndal, that so far as science can 
yet foresee, the advancing evolution can only 
issue in gradual dissolution ; that the potential 
forces of heat, light, and life, which have been 
stored from the primitive nebula, or from sur- 
rounding meteors in star, sun, and planet, as 
the ages roll on, will inevitably be spent, and 
the whole machinery of the heavens fall back 
into ruins; that already the moon is but a 
charred cinder of the earth, the earth a cool- 
ing ember of the sun, the sun a blazing frag- 
ment of the stars, the stars themselves but 
dying suns, and all their galaxies doomed to 
pale and wane into universal night and death. 

The design of the heavens, the habitability 
of other worlds and their mutual relations, the 
possibility of life and intelligence throughout 
the universe, are also emerging questions of 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 15 

like double import. While the one party, from 
Dionysius and Gregory to Chalmers, have im- 
agined an ascending hierarchy of angels, prin- 
cipalities, and powers, rank above rank, through 
the heaven of heavens toward the throne of 
Jehovah; the other party, from Plutarch and 
Galileo to Whewell, can discern in the stars, 
sun, and planets only so many globes of fire, 
vapor, and slag, wholly incapable of sustaining 
life and reason, and as destitute of any intelli- 
gible purpose as the crystals that sparkle or 
the flowers that bloom where no eye can ever 
see them. 

And the concluding question as to the goal 
or aim of the whole cosmic process has at 
length issued in the extreme opinions of Jona- 
than Edwards and Herbert Spencer ; on the one 
hand that of a miraculous creation and regene- 
ration of the heavens and earth at fixed epochs 
for the good of creatures and the glory of their 
Creator ; on the other hand, that of a rhythmic 
ebb and flow of ever persistent force from 
nebula to planet and planet to nebula, from 
chaos to cosmos and cosmos to chaos, through 
endless cycles of evolving and dissolving worlds, 
amid which man sports upon the earth, as the 
merest animalcule of a bubble that flashes in 
the sunshine. 



16 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 



GEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS. 

Geology next meets us with problems scarce- 
ly less grand and even more interesting, such 
as the origin of our own planet, the formation 
of the rocky layers which inclose its hidden 
contents, and the growth of the fossil plants and 
animals which are found buried in its crust. 
On the one side of the question is the hypothe- 
sis of secular evolution, of a slow unfolding -of 
the globe from a chaotic mass into its organ- 
ized form through the action of existing causes 
during indefinite time. If any germs of such 
an hypothesis can be traced in the mundane 
egg of Orpheus and Aristophanes, the prim- 
itive water and fire of Thales and Heraclitus, 
and the speculations of Strabo upon floods 
and volcanoes, they remained buried under 
dogmatic traditions during the Middle Ages 
until they were again brought forth by the 
early Italian geologists, as Lyell has shown, 
and at length cast into a more scientific shape. 
Leibnitz, without calling in question the Mosaic 
cosmogony, postulated for his " protogea " or 
primitive earth, a sort of extinguished sun, 
slowly cooling through fire and vapor into the 
clouds, seas, lands, and strata of our present 
globe. Buffbn, at the request of the Theologi- 
cal Faculty, recanted a similar " Theory of the 
Earth," in which he had fancied the planets as 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 17 

ancient fragments of the sun, struck off by a 
comet and left freezing as they whirled in their 
orbits ; our earth at this date still retaining the 
volcanic nucleus and universal ocean by whose 
joint action its seas and continents are formed. 
Werner and Hutton, as founders of the rival 
schools of Neptunists and Vulcanists, at length 
traced the aqueous and igneous strata to the 
same causes which are still producing alluvium 
and lava, though at a rate that would require 
an immeasurable past. Lamarck and St. Hi- 
laire broached theories of transmutation serv- 
ing to blend together through long epochs the 
fossil and living species which Cuvier would 
have broken apart with his successive deluges. 
Herschel and Poisson, in like manner, sought 
to transform ancient into modern climates by 
means of celestial causes of inconceivable slow- 
ness, such as a swaying of the earth's orbit and 
poles in the solar rays, a fluctuation of heat 
and light in the sun itself, and even radiation 
among the stars. Babbage and Lyell traced 
the secular changes of climate and species to 
more terrestrial causes, such as the decline of 
the earth's primitive heat and the gradual shift- 
ing of the continents by the action of its crust. 
Humboldt, bringing these facts together in one 
comprehensive review, has sketched the pro- 
gressive stages of our planet as at first a fiery 
ring cast off from the nebulous sun, then an 



18 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

incandescent sphere, and at length a granite 
shell sustaining between the central fire and 
solar heat the successive kingdoms of organic 
life which for unknown ages have flourished 
upon its surface. Most living geologists and 
paleontologists seem to proceed upon some 
such hypothesis ; and by the advanced party, 
according to Professor Huxley, it is held to be 
not unlikely that the whole development of the 
globe through all its eras and phases may yet 
be as plainly traced as the growth of a fowl 
within the egg. 

On the other side of the same question is the 
dogma of successive creations, of Almighty 
fiats calling into being one after another, 
land and sea and sky, reptiles, plants, and ani- 
mals, in six days of twenty-four hours, a few 
thousand years ago. Although derived from 
the Mosaic Genesis, it is a dogma which has 
varied its terms with each age of the Church. 
The early fathers, Clement and Origen, treated 
the six days as sacred allegorifes rather than 
literal epochs. The later fathers, Athanasius 
and Augustine, termed them the mere timeless 
acts of an instantaneous creation, successive only 
in our thought, and figuratively represented to 
us as working days measured by sunrise and 
sunset. The schoolmen, Hugh of St. Victor 
and Peter Lombard, defined them as miraculous 
works which might indeed have been performed 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES'. 19 

all at once as the fathers taught, but in fact 
were produced successively in six literal days 
as religious lessons of the Creator to his crea- 
tures. The Westminster divines also held them 
to be periods of twenty-four hours, and found 
their rationale in the seven- fold division of time 
in six days of work with one of worship. Fran- 
cis Turretine argued that each day's work was 
produced instantaneously by a single fiat, plants 
and animals starting forth in a mature state 
and therefore in the autumn of the year. Arch- 
bishop Usher, by act of Parliament, fixed the 
date of Creation on the 25th of October, 4004, 
B. c. The learned Dr. Gill particularized the 
name as well as date of each creative day from 
Monday morning to Saturday night. Living 
divines, who still follow these different authori- 
ties have as yet made no new definitions of 
the dogma, and for anything that appears in 
our existing creeds, the interminable strata, 
floras, and faunas which geologists have been 
unfolding, are still to be viewed as only so 
many didactic miracles wrought in a single 
week. 

As before indicated, it would not fall within 
the scope of this survey to notice the more 
scientific attempts of Hugh Miller and Guyot 
to expand still further the Mosaic days into 
vast creative epochs or cosmogonic eras; nor 
yet the less dogmatic efforts of Strauss and 



20 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

Baden Powell to resolve them into a philo- 
sophic myth or poem. 

The destiny of the globe is also becoming a 
scientific as well as a religious question. It 
formed part of the ancient faith as matured by 
Augustine and Aquinas and depicted in the 
sacred arts, that our earth, having once been 
cleansed by water for the sin of man, would 
yet be purged by fire for his redemption, at a 
given signal when the Purgatory beneath it 
would send forth its flames. And even some 
of the early geologists, such as Hooke and Ray, 
looked upon the earthquake and the volcano as 
agents, no less than presages, of such a catas- 
trophe. But we are now told in accordance 
with the views of Fourier, Thompson, and 
Mayer, that the earth is already oxidated or 
burnt through its crust halfway to the core ; 
that it has grown so cool in the course of ages 
that it could not now melt a layer of ice ten feet 
thick in one hundred years ; and that the lunar 
tides which act as brakes upon the rotatory 
motion imparted by its primordial heat must in 
time cause it to spin more slowly and feebly, 
until at length it shall flutter upon its axis as a 
dead world like the moon, ever turning the 
same pallid face to the sun. 

And the remaining question as to the end or 
scope of the whole terrestrial development, at 
length lands us between the contrasted views 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 21 

of Burnet and Lyell ; on the one side that of a 
miraculous deluge and conflagration of the 
earth between the epochs of creation and judg- 
ment, for the sake of man alone ; and on the 
other side that of vast periodic changes of 
climate and species as the globe heaves and 
shifts its continents and seas through the great 
year of the zodiac, or nods to and from the 
sun, crowned with verdure and capped with 
snow every other 12,000 years, or mayhap 
journeys with the sun itself among the stars 
18,000,000,000 years through a sidereal sum- 
mer and winter, between which our whole 
historic era with all its growing annals and 
splendid works shall seem transient as the 
hues of morning or the flowers of spring. 

PROBLEMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 

Anthropology at this point comes forward 
with problems still more complex and moment- 
ous, such as the origin of our race, the first 
appearance of man upon the earth, and 'the 
mode of his connection with the organic scale. 
On the one side of the question rises before us 
the hypothesis of derivative evolution, of a 
gradual growth of animal into human species, 
under organic and climatic laws, long ages ere 
history was born. It was a prevalent opinion 
of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as ex- 
pressed by Epicurus and Horace, that when 



22 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

the animals of the new earth at first crept 
forth as a dumb and filthy herd, they fought 
for acorns and hiding-places with their fists, 
with cudgels, at length with weapons; that 
soon they invented names for things and words 
for their thoughts, and finally began to abstain 
from war, to fortify towns, and to enact laws. 
But since this classic myth disappeared from 
the view of Western Europe before the tradi- 
tions of the Church, it has only been by suc- 
cessive conquests over physical and religious 
antipathy, that the grim pleasantries of Mon- 
boddo and Samuel Johnson have at length 
passed into a grave controversy of science. 
De Maillet, vailing his ironical purpose in a 
" Dialogue between a Christian Missionary and 
a Heathen Sage," opened the question with 
glimpses of the primitive animals, the merman 
among them, rising from the slime of the 
Deluge and becoming in the course of genera- 
tions adapted to the slowly desiccated earth. 
Lamarck imagined such transmutations to have 
occurred through the long eras and stages of 
an organic progression by the instinctive efforts 
of animals to adjust themselves to new con- 
ditions, the stranded turtle growing into the 
tortoise, the high-browsing camel into the 
giraffe, and even the upright orang into savage 
and civilized man. The author of the " Vestiges 
of Creation' ' recalled these speculations from the 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 23 

obscurity into which they had been shaded by 
the great name of Cuvier, mainly to show the 
need of some higher law of development than 
the mere efforts and habits of animals them- 
selves. Professor Richard Owen many years 
ago surmised the probable action of a physical 
law by which nature has advanced, with slow 
and stately steps, through the archetypal light, 
from the earliest vertebrate in the fish, to the 
glorious form of man. Messrs. Darwin, Hook- 
er, and Wallace have at length proposed as 
such a law for the vegetable and animal world 
the survival of the best or fittest breeds in the 
struggle for subsistence which is ever going on 
among the teeming populations of nature. Mr. 
Darwin, conjecturing that man himself may 
thus have fought his way upward from the in- 
ferior races, has been collecting the inherited 
proofs of such origin from his embryonic 
stages, his rudimental organs, and his very 
physiognomy. Professor Huxley has suggested 
that even his highest faculties of feeling and 
intellect may be seen germinating in some of 
the lower species with which he is most nearly 
connected. Professor Haeckel declares that, 
in the course of his organic life, from the 
germ to the grave, he epitomizes all the suc- 
cessive types of the palaeontological scale. 
And Sir Charles Lyell already looks for his 
pedigree in the entombed dynasties of nature 



24 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES, 

among such typical shapes as the proudest 
nobles still blazon for their crests. It is fre- 
quently said that the majority of living nat- 
uralists accept the hypothesis in its different 
forms, or at least the principle upon which it 
proceeds, and they would doubtless agree with 
a saying attributed to Schaaffhausen, that the 
secular transformation of animal into human 
species, if once proved, could be no more mar- 
velous to science than the simplest metamor- 
phosis of an egg into a bird or of a child into 
a man. 

On the other side of the same question stands 
the dogma of independent creation, of an im- 
mediate formation of man out of the ground, 
in the image of God, on the sixth day of the 
first week of the world. It has come down to 
us through various forms of statement, from 
the earliest comments on the writings of Moses. 
The rabbins, from the son of Sirach to Philo, 
delighted to depict the divine image in Adam 
as reflecting every conceivable perfection of 
body and mind. The fathers Tertullian, Chrys- 
ostom, and Augustine discerned it in his godlike 
aspect and dominion, in his intellectual and 
moral attributes, and in a miniature trinity of 
his body, soul, and spirit. The schoolmen, St. 
Bernard, Lombard, -and Duns Scotus distin- 
guished it into that intellectual image which 
even in Gehenna cannot be consumed, and that 






THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 25 

moral likeness which he lost by the fall. The 
later doctors Bellarmin and Suarez described 
such moral likeness as a paradisaic dowry which 
he had forfeited, a virginal wreath of which he 
had been despoiled. The reformers Luther and 
Calvin, the Puritans Owen and Edwards, re- 
defined it as a physical, intellectual, and moral 
likeness which has been wholly lost or marred, 
and can only be supernaturally restored. No 
existing body of divines has since thought of 
retouching these ancient symbols, and at the 
present moment, while anthropologists on all 
sides are mining into the fossil flora and fauna 
coeval with primitive man, our reigning dog- 
matic conceptions are still as crude and vague 
as the frescoes of Raphael and the paradise of 
Milton. 

It will be observed that the pre-Adamite and 
co-Adamite races of Peyrerius and Agassiz, as 
well as the pre-lapsarian tribes of Blichner and 
Yogt, by the terms of our survey, are alike 
excluded from view. 

The development of mankind, the rise of 
races, languages, and arts is a further question 
which science begins to share with religion. It 
has been the traditional faith, from the time of 
Augustine, that the human species, being po- 
tentially folded in Adam, fell with him from 
Paradise, became whelmed in a universal flood, 
were renewed from the loins of Noah, and 



26 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

afterward, by a miraculous confusion of lan- 
guage, dispersed over the earth into nations and 
tribes, with an ever-lapsing or perverted civili- 
zation. And until very lately, scientific anthro- 
pologists were retracing all existing races to 
Shem, Ham, and Japhet ; all living dialects to 
the primitive Hebrew, and all remaining mon- 
uments and traditions to the tower of Barbel. 
But we are now threatened with a total revo- 
lution of these opinions. Ethnologists, such as 
Agassiz, Morton, and Owen, have been group- 
ing mankind into indigenous races, through all 
the hues of climate, from the Ethiopian sable 
to the rose of Circassia ; grading them in dis- 
tinct classes, by all degregs of the facial angle, 
from the low forehead of the ape to the vertical 
brow of the Apollo ; and following them back- 
ward from one epoch to another beyond the 
time of Moses, through all the dynasties of the 
Pharaohs. Philologists such as Max Miiller, 
Whitney, and Schleicher, have been unfolding 
human speech into its formative stages, the 
radical, the agglutinate, the amalgamate ; tra- 
cing its roots to imitative sounds or natural 
cries, and even expanding its growth through 
long eras of fossil dialects, rudimentary letters, 
and phonetic types, between the extremes of 
animal and human expression, from the chatter 
of an Australian forest to the comedies of 
Shakespeare and Moliere. Archaeologists, such 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 27 

as Lubbock, Stevens, and Westropp, have been 
sketching human culture through its pre-his- 
toric ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, 
from the flint-chip to the steam-engine, from 
the rude cairn to the marbles of the Parthenon, 
and exhibiting the savage peoples of the earth 
in advancing stages, the hunter, the herdsman, 
the farmer, during long epochs, ere civilization 
was known. And archaeo-geologists, so called, 
such as Schmerling, Lartet, and Lyell, have 
been restoring the flora and fauna of the pre- 
historic periods, the beech and the horse of the 
iron age, the oak and the goat of the bronze 
age, the pine and the reindeer of the stone age, 
the bear and the glacier of the savage epoch, 
until at last they have carried the torch into a 
primeval cavern, in search of mammoth bones 
and simian skulls, as the rude birthplace of 
civilized man. 

And the concluding question as to the des- 
tiny of mankind, the aim and prospect of the 
whole human evolution, at length opens two 
opposite views ; on the one side, the prediction 
of a regenerated race upon the scene of a reno- 
vated earth, with the wilderness budding as a 
rose, the lion transformed into a lamb, and man 
again an innocent child of paradise ; and on 
the other side, the prognosis of a gradual de- 
cline as well as growth of humanity, when the 
noblest races shrill have lost their ancestral 



28 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

vigor, the richest tongues their classic grace, 
the finest arts their pristine purity ; when even 
the productive stores and sustaining powers 
of nature herself shall have been exhausted, 
and the lingering plants, animals, and effete 
tribes of men shall fade away like the leaves 
of Autumn, while the earth veers back into 
her glacial epoch, and the sun can no longer 
vivify the nations that have basked in his 
rays, 

PROBLEMS IN THE PSYCHICAL SCIENCES. 

Our survey has now brought us to the verge 
of those higher psychical sciences which, as 
they include the nearest human interests, are 
bristling with portentous questions, not likely 
to be treated in that passionless mood which 
belongs to scientific inquiries, and yet all the 
more imperiously claiming our attention. 

Psychology is already pressing upon us such 
problems as the origin, the development and 
the destiny of the individual, of his cognitions, 
his emotions, his volitions, and is presenting 
like divergent opinions ; on the one side such 
recent hypotheses as those of Herbert Spencer, 
Maudsley, and Moleschott, that mind is a prod- 
uct of matter, that the will is a developed 
force acting under laws, and that death is the 
dissolution of that matter, the conversion of 
that force ; and on the other side, such tra- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 29 

ditional dogmas as those of Lactantius, Au- 
gustine, and Jerome, that the soul has been 
created in the body, that the will may be re- 
generated by irresistible grace, and that the 
spirit will be reclothed hereafter with the 
whole present body. And while some psychol- 
ogists are ready to retrace the devout materi- 
alism of Bonnet and Priestley, others are but 
reverting to the sensual fatalism of La Mettrie 
and D'Holbach. 

Sociology is not far behind with such prob- 
lems as the origin, the development, and the 
destiny of society, of its arts, its sciences, its 
polities ; and is branching with a similar diver- 
gence of views ; on the one side, the hypothe- 
ses of such civilians as Locke, Vico, and Draper, 
that the state is a social contract ; that the his- 
tory of nations proceeds under periodic and 
progressive laws, and that societies, like indi- 
viduals, physiologically viewed, have their in- 
fancy, youth, age, and decline, are born but 
to grow and die ; and on the other side, the 
dogmas of such ecclesiastics as Bellarmin, Bos- 
suet, and Edwards, that the church is an abso- 
lute theocracy, that Providence throughout 
history has been a systematic judgment of the 
nations on behalf of the church, and that the 
nations are yet to be subdued by the miracu- 
lous return and reign of Christ. And if some 
scientific historians, like Buchez and Patrick 



30 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

Dove, have looked for their ideal society in the 
course of prophecy and Providence, others, 
like Condorcet and St. Simon, have sought it 
only through revolution and reform. 

Theology also is emerging with new prob- 
lems, such as the origin, the development, 
and the destiny of religion, of its traditions, its 
creeds, and its cults, and is already breaking 
into hostile camps; on the one side, the vo- 
taries of mere natural religion, such as Theo- 
dore Parker, Max Mliller, and Comte, holding 
that there is one essential universal faith de- 
rived from the light of nature, that there has 
been a scale and growth of religions in history 
through degrees of relative perfection, and that 
the perfect religion of the future will consist in 
the deification of humanity, the worship of wom- 
anhood, and the hierarchy of science ; and on 
the other side, the disciples of revealed religion, 
such as Leland, Paley, and Chalmers, maintain- 
ing that a revelation of religion is necessary as 
well as important ; that there has been a primi- 
tive miraculous revelation, of which other pre- 
tended revelations are but corruptions or coun- 
terfeits, and that this revealed religion is 
destined to prevail over all other religions by 
supernatural conversions and judgments at the 
end of the present dispensation. And though 
some comparative theologians, such as Hard- 
wick and Edward Spiess, are endeavoring to 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 31 

recapitulate the world's religions in Christian- 
ity, others, such as Strauss and Feuerbach, 
have striven to reduce Christianity itself to 
mere mythology and self-illusion. 

And the general question to be gathered 
from all the psychical sciences at length pre- 
sents to us on the one side the opinion that the 
regenerate soul, the church, and the coming 
millennium are parts of a new spiritual system 
ensuing upon the old material creation, and on 
the other side the conjecture that religion, 
science, politics, art, all were once potential in 
the flames of the sun, and must yet revert to 
the fiery cloud from whence they sprang. 

PROBLEMS 'OF METAPHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

Behind these problems of the physical and 
psychical sciences are others still more recon- 
dite and abstruse — the metaphysical questions 
as to the essential nature of mind and matter 
and the absolute reality before and beneath all 
phenomena; questions which on the one side 
have at length issued in the opinions of Her- 
bart, Lotze, and Fechner that phenomena both 
material and spiritual are the expressions of 
real essences or conscious monads, or self- 
manifesting souls ; together with the extreme 
speculations of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hart- 
mann, that the intelligible universe is a logical 
process of absolute reason and thought, or a 



32 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

product of blind primordial force and human 
will, or a historical development of uncon- 
scious force and will into conscious thought 
and reason. Questions which, on the other 
side, have scarcely advanced beyond the an- 
cient dogmas, that body and soul are created 
substances co-acting mechanically as instru- 
ments of divine foreordination, and that there 
is a trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit in the 
self-existent Jehovah manifested to us through 
the miracles of creation, incarnation, atone- 
ment, and final judgment. 

At the same time, as the issue of modern 
metaphysical thought, we have at the one ex- 
treme an optimism which seeks to identify the 
revealed Jehovah as the one Absolute Reason, 
the first and final cause of a perfected crea- 
tion; and at the other extreme a pessimism 
which would exhibit the developing universe 
as an abortive paradox, beginning and ending 
in hopeless contradiction. 

PROBLEMS m THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCES. 

And high above all these problems in the 
different sciences, we may now behold the great 
summary question as to the course and goal of 
the sciences themselves, as to their logical pro- 
cesses, their historical laws, and their ultimate 
limits. On the one side we have the decisions 
of Bacon, D'Alembert, Comte, Mill, and Spen- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 33 

cer, that positive science is restricted to facts 
and their laws without inquiring into their 
first and final causes, that the niore advanced 
sciences have historically reached this positive 
state only by excluding all inquiry into causes, 
and thus outgrowing and destroying theology 
and metaphysics, and that their final goal is 
sheer nescience or the recognition of an un- 
knowable reality as the ground of all know- 
able phenomena. On the other side we have 
the opinions of Tertullian, Aquinas, Calvin, and 
Butler, that the unknowable to man is revealed 
by God through miraculously attested commu- 
nications, that it has been the function of such 
revelation to remedy human ignorance and 
expose false science, and that ultimately all 
earthly science for the individual will be lost in 
beatific vision, and for the race will be eclipsed 
by the millennial light of a new apocalypse. 
And it remains to be seen whether, in the true 
theory of science, reason is to progressively 
coincide with revelation, or revelation to be 
gradually superseded by reason. 

Such then is the present state of the sciences. 
While they embrace immense bodies of exact 
knowledge, too vast for any one mind to master, 
too magnificent for even the imagination to de- 
pict, they also present a bewildering mass of un- 
solved problems with opposite hypotheses and 
dogmas respecting them which have been held 



34 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

by the master-spirits of former times, and 
which still engross the leading intellects of our 
day. Renewing the remark with which this 
paper began, that the aim has been simply to 
state these questions with all fairness and not 
to discuss them, I shall now submit some de- 
ductions from the survey which seem to lie 
upon the surface in full view of all parties. 

PHILOSOPHICAL NATURE OF THESE PROBLEMS. 

In the first place, it is plain that these ques- 
tions are not purely scientific. They have not 
been so treated in past ages, and they are not 
so treated at the present day. No competent 
scientific authority has yet pronounced upon 
them. The French Academy has not decided 
them. The British Association has not decided 
them. The different Italian, German, and 
American associations have not decided them. 
There is not even any spontaneous concurrence 
of scientific men respecting them, such as that 
which attends all observed facts, ascertained 
laws, and proved theories. It cannot be claimed 
that the great names in science have ever been 
or are now, arrayed against the religious view 
of them. And it is not too much to say that 
they can never be decided by any merely 
scientific process. The origin and destiny of 
nebulae, suns, and planets, of man with his in- 
dividual, social, and religious interests, of the 






THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 35 

universe through all its eras and phases, are 
surely problems which by no inductive search 
among existing facts and laws, can be fully 
brought within the revision and prevision of 
science, but must sooner or later, as her most 
loyal votaries are now confessing, lead her to 
that verge of the knowable where her torch 
becomes quenched in the Unknowable and she 
has no more light to shed. 

Ift the second place, it is also clear that these 
questions are not merely religious. If they 
were so treated in former times, they are not 
so treated to-day. The religious authorities 
which have ventured to pronounce upon them 
have not settled them. The Papal Syllabus 
has not settled them. The Evangelical Alli- 
ance has not settled them. The different ec- 
clesiastical councils have not settled them. 
There is not even such general agreement of 
religious people concerning them as that which 
belongs to the chief essentials of the Christian 
faith. It cannot be held that the great names 
in religion have always been or are now joined 
together against the scientific view of them. 
And it is safe to say that by no purely religious 
method can they ever be settled. The attempt 
of all churches and sects combined, through any 
mere grammatic interpretation of the Holy 
Scriptures, under pretense of infallible guid- 
ance, and in contempt of all other means of 



36 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

knowledge, to show how the heavens and earth 
and man were created and will be renewed, 
would simply remand religion to the supersti- 
tion and bigotry of the dark ages, and at 
length, as her most devout disciples will admit, 
dim her light at the very points where it should 
shine most brightly. 

In the third place, it will follow that these 
questions, being partly scientific and partly re- 
ligious, are strictly philosophical, and should 
be so treated by all parties. That they are 
partly scientific and partly religious is a fact 
that runs through all the past. From their 
very origin they have involved both elements. 
The history of neither could be written without 
thitt of the other. The successive conflicts and 
alliances of the scientific and religious classes 
at the great epochs of civilization, among the 
Sophists, among the Fathers, among the School- 
men, among the Eeformers, have been the very 
rythm of human progress. There is scarcely 
a dogma which has not served as an hypothesis 
in science, as there is scarcely an hypothesis 
which has not been used for a dogma in re- 
ligion. The great names in each, or at least 
the masters in both, have ever striven to keep 
them together rather than to drive them apart. 
Plato and Origen, Augustine and Erigena, Al- 
bertus and Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and 
Butler, from age to age, have illustrated their 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 37 

essential oneness. It could be shown, indeed, 
as the largest minds on both sides have long 
perceived, that their own peculiar processes 
and exigencies soon bring them face to face 
in the mutual recognition of knowable facts 
which the one must discover and of unknow- 
able realities which the other must reveal. 
And the common ground between them, formed 
by their intersection, instead of narrowing has 
been enlarging with the lapse of time and 
the growth of knowledge, until now it has 
become not merely a conspicuous arena in the 
philosophical world, but even a popular sign of 
the times. 

PROFESSOR TTKDALL'S ILLUSTRATION. 

Of this fact there could scarcely have been 
a more striking proof than the recent brilliant 
and lucid address of Professor Tyndall from 
the chair of the British Association — an ad- 
dress widely and justly praised, as well for 
the graces of its style as for the vigor, acute- 
ness, and breadth of its thought, the elevation, 
courage, and candor of its tone. That the 
questions which it broaches could be so dis- 
cussed and received in a scientific body, would 
be a full vindication, were any needed, of their 
fitness to such occasions. It was right that 
they should be taken there, and it is right that 
they should be brought here, if only they are 



38 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

held under the dry light of pure science, within 
the purview orf philosophy. How to adjust 
them has indeed become " the problem of 
problems at the present hour ; " and that, not 
merely that we may " yield reasonable satisfac- 
tion to a religious sentiment in the emotional 
nature/' for with this, science may have little 
to do ; but also, and chiefly, that we may meet 
a logical demand of the understanding, a crown- 
ing want of the intellect of man. 

Perhaps the true philosophical nature of the 
problems which have been stated could not be 
better illustrated, for the present purpose at 
least, than by means of the rhetorical device 
so skillfully employed in that paper. A dis- 
ciple of Lucretius, it will be remembered, is 
supposed to have engaged Bishop Butler in an 
encounter of wits over one of the chapters in 
his immortal Analogy ; the combatants having 
been armed with the added knowledge of our 
time, like Milton's embattled angels, to dare an 
argument of mysteries. It is easy to paint 
portraits to suit ourselves when we hold the 
pencil, and there is always some risk of un- 
fairness in speaking for another. But I shall 
try to avoid such dangers as my predecessor 
has done, by simply fancying the two disputants 
to reappear before us at the point which their 
discussion had reached, and allowing them to 
proceed with it, in our hearing, a step further 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 39 

toward its logical issue. Let the Bishop speak 
first, and the disciple of Lucretius shall have 
the last word. 

" Before we leave this subject of living 
agents, most noble Lucre tian, I beg to remind 
you that there is involved in it a very interest- 
ing question which you have scarcely touched 
upon. You will remember that my whole ar- 
gument had reference not so much to the 
nature of the living agent or self, as to its 
destiny. I was trying to prove inductively, 
from observed facts, that our survival after 
death is as probable, if not as certain, as any 
other scientific prevision attempted under like 
conditions. Beginning with those two great 
presumptions or high probabilities upon which 
all positive science proceeds, the uniformity and 
continuance of nature, I argued that we shall 
continue to live hereafter, unless it be imagined 
that death, of which we know nothing, de- 
stroys us ; and against this mere imaginary 
presumption I brought forward various scien- 
tific presumptions afforded by observation and 
experience, such as the following : That if 
death means, as you affirm, the dissolution of 
your atoms, then your essential bulk may be 
such that you cannot be dissolved, like that 
infinitesimal germ out of which has been de- 
veloped your whole present self, together with 



40 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

the inherited ^aits of your ancestors : That 
already most of your atoms have been dissolved 
and replaced every seven, ten, or twenty years, 
not merely bones, tissues, nerves, but the brain 
itself, dying a thousand deaths : That large 
portions even of your nervous atoms might be 
dissolved without being replaced and you still 
be conscious of your phantom-limb, or go on 
thinking with but half of your brain : That 
through all these dissolutions, that hidden self 
of yours, picture it as you will, persists and 
survives, with its peculiar powers of thought 
and feeling, whatever they may be, even amid 
disease, injury, and madness itself: That after 
the last more rapid dissolution, sooner or later, 
should that mysterious consciousness, of which 
you have spoken as coming and going so 
strangely, be recovered in some new ethereal 
organism las unlike its old counterpart as that 
god-like form was itself unlike its earlier icthyic 
germ, or as the brilliant insect is unlike its off- 
cast larva, some spiritual body, 1 wholly im- 
perceptible by our present senses, yet itself 
gifted with more than microscopic insight, 
locomotive swiftness, and telegraphic thought — 
all these marvels would be no greater than are 
daily passing before your eyes : That though 
existing plants and animals, having shown no 
such power of individual progression, should 

1 Carpenter's Human Physiology, Art. 78. 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 41 

perish with their species and. be replaced by 
other and fitter forms in that second state into 
which you had been born — 

11 ' With all the circle of the wise, 
The perfect flower of human time,' 

yet even this would be only such meet survival 
as now separates us from primeval ferns and 
dragons, a just predominance of the higher 
over the lower forces in the planetary life, a 
strictly cosmic birth, as free from miracle or 
catastrophe as the coming of an infant into the 
world or the transformation of the earth in 
spring ; in a word, 6 as natural as the visible 
known course of things.' 1 

" You will observe that this is a mere scientific 
hypothesis, and not a religious dogma. I have 
carefully excluded from it any theological, 
metaphysical, or even ethical opinions which 
might seem to prejudice it in your eyes. You 
may have your own opinions upon such points, 
and the argument will still hold. You may 
•picture yourself as the merest combination of 
atoms that the materialist can conceive ; but 
I have shown you that the dissolution of our 
gross organized bodies c would not be our de- 
struction, even without determining whether 
our living substances be material or imma- 
terial.' You may imagine that combination 
of your atoms to have been as fortuitous as 

1 Butler's Analogy, chap. i. 



42 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

any that the atheist can trace ; but c that we 
are to live hereafter is just as reconcilable with 
the scheme of atheism, and as well to be ac- 
counted for by it, as that we are now alive is ; 
and therefore nothing can be more absurd than 
to argue, from that scheme, that there can be 
no future state.' You may even discard the 
moral motives of such a state for any humane 
virtues that the secularist can practice, as c if 
it were certain that our future interest no way 
depended upon our present behavior ; ' yet 
' curiosity could not but sometimes bring a sub- 
ject in which we may be so highly interested 
to our thoughts, especially upon the mortality 
of others or the near prospect of our own ; ' 
and it is in the light of such mere curiosity, as 
a question of pure science, that I have put 
it before you, to be tested as coolly as you 
would dissect an embryo or a chrysalis." 

Lucretius, if history speaks truly, was not 
the man to shirk a question because of its log- 
ical consequences, and we can fancy without 
much effort what sort of rejoinder a true Lu- 
cretian would make to the Bishop's reasoning. 

" I have listened," he might say, " to your 
ingenious argument with the interest of a 
philosopher. It bears upon a subject which 
engrossed some of the finest minds of Greece 
and Rome, from Socrates and Plato to Cicero 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 43 

and Seneca. It was not, you are aware, the doc- 
trine of Epicurus, nor that which I learned from 
my master. He taught me that from atoms all 
things have come, and to atoms they must re- 
turn. Through their endless compositions and 
decompositions the forms of man, beast, bird, 
and flower appear and disappear, come and go, 
and are seen no more. Even the ethereal and 
luminous particles of the soul itself, together 
with the grosser body through which they are 
diffused, must scatter and vanish like down be- 
fore the wind. Death is therefore the mere 
dissolution of certain compounded atoms which 
thenceforth can serve no higher purpose than to 
enrich the earth and nourish plants and animals 
which may feed other generations of men. 

"And this theory he framed into eloquent 
verse, as I have told you, for the very purpose 
of counteracting certain dogmas which domi- 
nated in his time. He saw men everywhere 
terrified with omens and disasters, which they 
attributed to the anger of the gods, and in 
order to dispel their fears, depicted those ideal 
beings in a remote heaven of apathy, sublimely 
indifferent to mortals, while nature moved on 
.beneath, with her measureless surges of atoms, 
majestically as the roll of his own hexameter. 
He found his countrymen wasting their best 
days in alternate dread and hope of Tartarean 
torments and Elysian raptures, and admonished 



44 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

them that the truest and highest virtue would 
scorn such selfish motives, and only look for 
the reward of duty in a tranquil enjoyment of 
the present life. And that other remaining 
terror of death which was ever shading their 
path he stripped before them into an empty 
negation as the mere loss of life, the last atomic 
thrill with which to glide into the passionless 
calm of the gods. He lived about sixty years 
before the Christian era. As I have explained 
to you, he died in the faith in which he had 
lived, and by his own tragic fate illustrated his 
creed as he stood, in the prime of life, at the 
height of his fame, about to execute that pur- 
pose from which the more irresolute Hamlet 
quailed : — 

" ' And therefore now 
Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all, 
Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart 
Those blind beginnings that have made me man, 
Dash them anew together at her will 
Through all her cycles.' 1 

Now I do not say, I have not said, that I adopt 
these theological and ethical opinions of my 
master, though they were essential parts of his 
system ; but if I should lay them aside, as you 
have laid aside yours, there would then re- 
main this mere hypothesis before us to be 
tested like any other by the facts. And it 
strikes me simply as a strong physical analogy 

1 Tennyson's Lucretius. 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 45 

which still lacks confirmation. Let me show 
• you how far I might go with you. You have 
proved that death may be but the birth into 
another life, that there is nothing improbable 
in a future state into which we may pass ' just 
as naturally as we came into the present.' Sen- 
eca surmised as much when he likened those 
who look for a future life to children in the 
womb preparing for this world. You have also 
projected into the future new and higher or- 
ganic types beyond those which, from the mol- 
lusk up to man, have been unfolded in the past. 
Such attempted prevision cannot seem wholly 
unscientific to a Lucretian, who believes it 
would have been possible ' from a knowledge 
of the properties of the molecules of the cosmic 
vapor to have predicted the state of the fauna 
of Britain in the year 1869 with as much cer- 
tainty as one can say what will happen to the 
vapor of the breath on a cold winter's day.' 1 
Nor have we any right ' to assume that man's 
present faculties end the series ' which has ex- 
tended all the way c from the Iguanodon and 
his cotemporaries to the President and mem- 
bers of the British Association.' 2 But at this 
point the difficulties begin. You have not sup- 
plied all the intermediate links in your ideal 
scale between our future and our present or- 

1 Prof. Huxley in The Academy for 1870. 

2 Prof. Tyndall's Address at the British Association in 1868. 



46 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

ganized selves. You have not shown the one 
evolving out of the other, the higher out of the 
lower. You have not exhibited that coming 
psychical body as originating among the space- 
less atoms or punctual forces or plastic proc- 
esses of the present organism, nor exposed to 
view the germination of its peculiar faculties 
and powers. You have not proved the capacity 
of existing earth and man to produce such 
spiritual bodies. You have not determined 
whether the interval between them and us will 
be brief or long ; whether they will recover 
consciousness soon or late ; whether they will 
be developed slowly or in a moment. In a 
word, the evidences of such a metamorphosis 
cannot be gathered from the existing state of 
knowledge, and if immediately forthcoming 
would appear little short of miraculous. Upon 
one point, however, we are agreed. You con- 
cede to science those rights of unrestricted 
search and free discussion which have been so 
hardly won in ' the progress of learning and of 
liberty.' That is all I ask. And I beg to assure 
you that in the event of any other trustworthy 
proofs of a future state being produced, it 
would be no bar to the theory even in the view 
of a Lucretian, that it should be found coinci- 
dent with the Jewish and Christian prejudices 
of a right reverend prelate whom no one ad- 
mires more than I do. On the contrary, to re- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 47 

ceive and act upon it, at least as a working 
hypothesis, would be but a dictate of Greek 
wisdom as well as Roman virtue." 

LORD BACOIST AS UMPIRE BETWEEN BISHOP 
BUTLER A1STD A LUCRETIAN". 

Leaving these somewhat prejudiced oppo- 
nents, let us now turn to another historic 
personage, accepted by them and by us all 
with the concurrent voice of more than two 
centuries of trial as an umpire, according to 
the stilted verse of Cowley, 

1 { Whom a wise king and nature chose 
Lord Chancellor of both their laws." 

Francis Bacon was neither a mere scientist 
nor a mere divine, but a civilian and philoso- 
pher who embraced within the view of his 
judicial intellect the most advanced science 
and the best divinity of his time. He pro- 
jected and partly constructed a magnificent 
" Instauration of the Sciences," which was de- 
signed to include all existing knowledge/both 
divine and human, in one comprehensive sys- 
tem. May we find any decisions of this high 
authority that will bear upon the controversy ? 

At one moment, indeed, he seems to lean 
toward the side of Lucretius. Having spoken 
of a sensitive or produced soul which he de- 
scribes as derived from the elements, and com- 
mon to man and the brutes, he urges more 



48 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. * 

diligent inquiry into its faculties of voluntary 
motion and sensibility, and as to its nature, dis- 
tinctly allows it must be material, " a corporeal 
substance, attenuated by heat and rendered in- 
visible, as a subtile breath or aura, of a flamy 
and airy nature, diffused through the whole 
body, but in perfect creatures residing chiefly 
in the head and thence running through the 
nerves, being fed and recruited by the spir- 
ituous blood of the arteries, as Telesius and his 
follower Donius have usefully shown." 

At another moment his judgment is on the 
side of Butler. Superadding to the sensitive 
or produced soul that rational or inspired soul 
which proceeds from the breath of God and dis- 
tinguishes man from the brutes, he concludes 
that " inquiries with relation to its nature, as 
whether it be native or adventitious, separable 
or inseparable, mortal or immortal, how far sub- 
ject to laws of matter, how far not, and the 
like, — though they might be more thoroughly 
sifted in philosophy than hitherto they have 
been, — in the end must be turned over to re- 
ligion for determination and decision ; since no 
knowledge of the substance of the rational soul 
can be had from philosophy, but must be de- 
rived from the same divine inspiration, whence 
the substance thereof originally proceeded." 

At the same time, he is careful to vindicate 
such a method of turning the scale by Scrip- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 49 

tural authority as still consistent and just to 
both parties : " We would not have borrowed 
this division from divinity, had it not also 
agreed with philosophy. For there are many 
excellencies of the human soul above the souls 
of brutes, manifest even to those who philoso- 
phize only according to sense. And wherever 
so many and such great excellencies are found, 
a specific difference should always be made. 
We do not, therefore, approve that confused 
and promiscuous manner of the philosophers in 
treating the functions of the soul, as if the soul 
of man differed in degree rather than species 
from the soul of brutes, as the sun differs from 
the stars, or gold from other metals. " 

And this is but an example of the general 
manner in which the great acknowledged mas- 
ter of philosophy would treat that whole class of 
scientific and religious problems which we have 
described as connected with the origin, course, 
and destiny of nature. 

Now, he yields to science all it can claim, as 
he argues so eloquently that the inquiry for 
final causes is wrongly placed in physics, and 
hath made a great devastation in that province : 
"And, therefore, the natural philosophies of 
Democritus and others, who allow no God or 
mind in the frame of things, but attribute the 
structure of the universe to infinite essays and 

trials of nature, or what they call fate or for- 

4 



50 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

tune, and assign the causes of particular things 
to the necessity of matter without any inter- 
mixture of final causes, seem, so far as we can 
judge from the remains of their philosophy, 
much more solid, and to have gone deeper into 
nature, with regard to physical causes, than the 
philosophy of Aristotle or Plato ; and this only 
because they never meddled with final causes, 
which the others were perpetually inculcating.' ' 

Again, he reserves for religion all that it de- 
mands, while he shows that final causes, when 
kept where they belong within the bounds of 
theology and metaphysics, are not repugnant 
to physical causes, but agree excellently with 
them as expressing the intentions of Provi- 
dence in the consequences of nature : " But 
Democritus and Epicurus when they advanced 
their atoms were thus far tolerated by some, 
but when they asserted the fabric of all things 
to be raised by a fortuitous concourse of these 
atoms, without the help of mind, they became 
universally ridiculous. So far are physical 
causes from drawing men off from God and 
Providence, that on the contrary, the philoso- 
phers employed in discovering them can find 
no rest but by flying to God and Providence at 
last." 

And when we inquire how these two adja- 
cent provinces are to be preserved and ad- 
justed, we may hear him discoursing of a Pri- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 51 

mary Philosophy , or mother of all the sciences, 
by whom they are to be cherished, and around 
whom their wrangling sisterhood is to be gath- 
ered in harmony. His conception of such a 
philosophy may seem crude and vague, but not 
more so than might have been expected in that 
age. In fact he is inclined to note it as still 
wanting; and in terms that almost exactly 
describe the exigency upon us at this hour : 
" For I find a certain rhapsody of natural the- 
ology, logic, and physics, delivered in a certain 
sublimity of discourse, by such as aim at being 
admired for standing on the pinnacles of the 
sciences ; but what we mean is, without am- 
bition, to design some general science, for the 
reception of axioms, not peculiar to any one 
science, but common to a number of them." 1 

THE UMPIRAGE OF PHILOSOPHY. 

The three personages before us have thus 
illustrated the classes to which they respect- 
ively belong, and the interests which they 
represent. Philosophy, in the best sense of 
the word, is the umpire between Science and 
Religion. As originally defined by Pythagoras 
and Cicero, it is itself the science of things 
divine and human, together with their causes. 
As that academic faculty which is complement- 
ary to the faculties of law, medicine, and theol- 

1 Bacon's Advancement of Learning, book iii., chap. 4. 



52 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

ogy, it includes whatsoever is common to both 
the secular and sacred departments of learning. 
As the science of knowledge, it aims to ascer- 
tain inductively the validity, the limits and the 
functions of reason and revelation, the two great 
correlate factors of knowledge. As the science 
of the absolute, so called by the Germans, it 
takes within its scope both the finite and the in- 
finite, both the knowable and the unknowable, 
for the respective provinces of reason and' rev- 
elation. As that summary universal science of 
which Bacon speaks, to which all the rest are 
tributary, it receives and cherishes impartially 
and equally the discovered and the revealed 
bodies of knowledge, that it may organize them 
into a rational system. And finally, in the 
most common and literal sense of the word, 
as the love of wisdom, Philosophy, while in- 
cluding and fostering the scientific virtues of 
curiosity, accuracy, and candor together with 
the religious graces of reverence, humility, and 
faith, over and above these qualities retains 
others more peculiar to herself, such as that 
power of abstraction, that insight into reality, 
that catholicity of view, that unquenchable crav- 
ing for unity of truth and symmetry of knowl- 
edge, which are not so likely to be practiced 
by the mere scientist or the mere religionist, so 
long as he is immersed in his own special re- 
searches, and which yet easily come to them both 
the moment they step into her wider sphere. 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 53 

It is to be regretted that a prejudice should 
exist in some minds against a word of such 
noble significance, and all the more as it 
is only in rare, cases that its true meaning 
would be repudiated. Though a few scien- 
tists and religionists may now and then have 
denounced philosophy as mystical or ration- 
alistic, yet the great mass would simply re- 
sent the imputation of being unphilosophical, 
as an insult to their understandings. There is 
plainly a good and valuable sense of the term 
which both parties spontaneously unite in using, 
and" which ought not to be sacrificed in any 
mere logomachy, so long us we have no better 
word to express it. If we would characterize 
a lover, seeker and reconciler of all truths, both 
natural and revealed, we must term him a 
philosopher. If we would describe that special 
work which is to be done in adjusting the re- 
lations of religion and science, in ascertaining 
and defending their respective spheres and pre- 
rogatives, in devising and applying logical rules 
to their pending controversies, in sifting their 
several portions of truth from error, and com- 
bining them into a harmonious system — we 
can only speak of all this as a peculiar in- 
tellectual task belonging neither to religion 
alone, nor to science alone, but to their com- 
mon ally and friend, philosophy. 

Philosophy, at least, is the actual, the ac- 
cepted umpire. The two parties have ever in 



54 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

fact, even though without concert, practically- 
owned her jurisdiction, and sought to justify 
themselves to each other in her view. It has 
been their aim to show that in being scientific 
or religious they mean to be also philosophical, 
to sacrifice no essential portion of the whole 
truth, and do no outrage to that common reason 
without which we can judge neither of the evi- 
dence of religion, nor of the claims of science. 
Instinctively they have appealed to her, in 
every great crisis of free thought, to guard 
and vindicate at once the authority of revela- 
tion and the rights of reason. And this un- 
conscious tribute has been more than repaid. 
To her, from the days of Justin, the first 
apologist, Eeligion largely owes its evidences, 
its defenses, its appliances ; to her, since the 
time of Aristotle, the first great logician, Science 
is mainly indebted for its methods, its rights, 
its triumphs ; and at this moment, in spite of 
their conflicting partisans, under her mild umpi- 
rage, whatsoever the one can establish as truly 
revealed, and the other as actually discovered, 
will be spontaneously accepted by them both. 

Philosophy, too, is the only available umpire. 
If we wished it otherwise we would wish in 
vain. The moment the two parties come into 
collision, it is found that neither can impose its 
own terms upon the other. Paramount as Re- 
ligion must be in her own sphere with her in- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES 55 

spired Bible and her illumined Church, yet 
scientific men will not accept from mere re- 
ligionists, as such, a judgment upon their the- 
ories ; and paramount as Science must be in her 
own sphere, with her unerring methods and un- 
questionable facts, yet religious men will not 
accept from mere scientists a judgment upon 
their doctrines. Neither party will be acknowl- 
edged as a competent and disinterested judge 
of the questions in dispute. Neither can afford 
from its own one-sided position a calm and 
full survey of the whole field of controversy. 
The rival claimants must leave their different 
spheres, though without sacrificing them, and 
for the time at least appear in some middle 
outside province which shall be equally re- 
moved from their respective prejudices and 
temptations, and where the whole truth shall 
be sought and prized as truth alone ; and for 
such a province we have no better name than 
philosophy. If at that only possible tribunal 
either could prevail against the other, so far 
as we can see (without some miraculous in- 
terposition for which we have no right to look), 
religion would degenerate into superstition and 
science into imbecility ; but being there legit- 
imated and reconciled, they will join hands as 
twin daughters of God and lovers of man. 

Philosophy, moreover, has become the one 
desirable umpire. It is best that the two par- 



56 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

ties should agree to treat the mixed problems 
rising between them as properly philosophical, 
rather than merely scientific or purely relig- 
ious. Their attempts to settle them apart, 
each by its own method, have brought upon 
us overwhelming evils. If the time once was 
when the religious class was unfolding a whole 
cyclopedia of science out of the Scriptures, from 
Genesis to the Apocalypse, as pure dogma and 
mystery of faith, yet the time has now come 
when a few, at least, in the scientific class are 
exhibiting a new genesis and apocalypse of re- 
ligion as the sheer product of science and specu- 
lation. And it is high time — I venture to say 
in the name of the great body of sober and fair 
minds on both sides, who refuse to commit them- 
selves to such wild extremes — that the two an- 
tagonists, on thus emerging from their respec- 
tive provinces into the broad plain of philosophy, 
should learn to respect their common rights 
and interests, and not imagine that either can 
claim the whole field against the other. It is 
time that the religionist should recognize be- 
fore him an immense mass of discovered facts, 
theories, hypotheses which are the fruit of two 
thousand years of research, which stand upon 
foundations of proof that cannot be shaken and 
are rising into a superstructure of knowledge 
too vast even to be conceived. It is time, too, 
that the scientist should cease to ignore that 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 57 

vast body of truths, doctrines, dogmas, backed 
by evidences which have been accumulating 
for eighteen centuries under the most search- 
ing criticism, which have more than convinced 
the great master minds of the past, and which 
are mounting every hour with cumulative prob- 
ability toward moral certainty itself. And when 
at length both parties meet face to face, as 
they are now meeting, before the final prob- 
lem of the universe, it is time for the one to 
admit that the processes of creation have not 
been revealed and cannot, by the most exact 
criticism, the most profound exegesis, the most 
systematic divinity, ever be discerned in the 
mere letter of Holy Scripture, and for the 
other to perceive that the theory of a Creator, 
anthropomorphic as it may appear, still keeps 
the field, still satisfies an immense number of 
scientific minds, and is not likely to be aban- 
doned even by the most advanced scientists, 
until something else or something better has 
been offered in its place. Only when they have 
thus taken philosophical views of the whole 
range of knowledge will they cease their raids 
upon each other's territory, and no longer 
maintain hostile barriers or hollow truces 
within the domain of truth. In the realm of 
Philosophy alone can they meet and find their 
needed mutual support, completion, and har- 
mony. 



58 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

The reconciliation of Science and Religion is 
not only a distinctive problem of Philosophy, 
but precisely that one chief problem by the 
solution of which her own function is ex- 
hausted, her goal attained, her mission ac- 
complished. In establishing the validity of 
human reason, in maintaining the authority of 
divine revelation, in logically combining them 
as coordinate means of knowledge and pouring 
their blended light upon all classes of facts, 
she is but fulfilling that sublime ideal towards 
which her followers from age to age have been 
struggling with unquenchable hope and courage. 
The one last perfect Philosophy is to be sought 
and can only be found in the demonstrated har- 
mony of Science and Religion. 

THE TRUE PHILOSOPHICAL SPIRIT. 

It may be well to say at this point that no 
disparagement of any one of the three in- 
terests, certainly no exaltation of Science over 
Religion or of Philosophy over either, is implied 
in this definition of their related provinces. 
An umpire is but the servant of the game that 
he watches, making neither the laws nor the 
facts, but simply applying the one to the other. 
And that only true Philosophy which seeks to 
embrace both Science and Religion in their 
normal relations must itself be predetermined 
and limited by them. Any attempt of the 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 59 

philosophic spirit to intrude into their domains 
with the view of distorting scientific facts or 
religious truths for mere speculative purposes, 
can only issue in confusion and evil. The so- 
called philosophies of Nature, such as those of 
Schelling and Oken, which aim to construct 
hypothetically the material universe without 
full empirical research, as well as the miscalled 
philosophies of religion, such as those of Hegel 
and Comte, which seek to prejudge the powers 
and relations of the Absolute Intelligence re- 
gardless of its actual expressions, are alike 
vain attempts of the mere reason to dispense 
with experience and revelation. And the 
would-be philosophers who aspire to conciliate 
the scientific and the religious spirit without 
any practical acquaintance with either are only 
sure to fall under the contempt of both. 

As little would it follow from the proposed 
definition, that the philosophical spirit must 
needs be organized in some visible tribunal, 
issuing authoritative decisions. The scientific 
spirit does not thus reach its results through 
any of the mere institutions or associations 
which embody and express it ; and the re- 
ligious spirit, though incorporated in churches 
and councils and claiming the authority of an 
infallible Scripture, does not command universal 
agreement. It is the crowning misfortune of 
the present crisis, that neither the disciples of 



60 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

Religion nor the votaries of Science are united 
in their respective interpretations of the Bible 
and of Nature, but appear divided among them- 
selves, as well as opposed to each other, by 
endless hypotheses and dogmas, throughout 
the entire field of research. And yet, as there 
must still be such a thing as true science and 
true religion amid all the schools and the sects, 
so there may be a true philosophy ever dis- 
criminating and mediating between them and 
a hidden fraternity of philosophers more or 
less consciously striving to bring them into 
harmony. 

It seems scarcely necessary to add that there 
can be no invidious distinction of classes in the 
pure democracy of intellect. The philosophic 
class is but recruited from the scientific and 
religious ranks, and can neither exist nor 
flourish without them. Any one joins it who 
pleases, stays in it as long as he chooses, and 
falls or rises by his own merit. None need to 
enter it who feel, as at times we all feel, that 
life is full enough of problems without adding 
to their number. Some may prefer to seclude 
themselves within their own provinces, to which 
they are wedded with the zeal of a votary. 
Others may make chance excursions beyond 
only to return as quickly to less debatable 
ground. Still others may even accept conscious 
contradiction rather than open conflict, reso- 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 61 

lutely holding the sternest creed with the 
strictest science, like the great Faraday, of 
whose laboratory and oratory it has been said, 
that he never entered either without shutting 
the door of the other. But the days for such 
a state of parties seem to be passing away. 
The trumpet of a new campaign has been 
sounded. Combatants have been marshaled 
and the lines are forming. When scientific and 
religious bodies have already begun to discuss 
the same problems from their opposite points 
of view, there can only be warfare or agree- 
ment. And in such a crisis, it is easy to see 
that the honors are more likely to go to those 
who are championing the extreme wings of 
Philosophy than to any that may be so brave or 
so rash as to risk the cross fire between them. 

an. illustkative philosophical scheme for 
harmonizing science and religion. 

It may give this discussion more definiteness 
and point, and rescue it from any vague gen- 
erality otherwise resting upon it, to sketch in 
outline a scheme of such philosophical prin- 
ciples as have been advocated — not, of course, 
with any hope of settling the problems before 
us, still less of issuing final rules for their settle- 
ment, but simply as an illustration of the field 
which has been defined and the work which yet 
remains to be performed. Such a scheme, it 



62 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

is obvious, will labor under the great disad- 
vantage of appearing as a mere dry, abstruse 
statement, when viewed apart from the facts 
and reasonings which support it. 

If we arrange the sciences upon the only 
philosophical principle, according to the order 
of facts in space and time as coexistent and suc- 
cessive, we shall have a series, rising from the 
simplest physical to the most complex psj^chical 
phenomena, and embracing both the celestial 
and terrestrial divisions of each set of phenom- 
ena, the mechanical, chemical, and organical ; 
the individual, social, and religious. And by still 
further separating them into abstract and con- 
crete groups, we shall get for our working clas- 
sification that one which has been produced in 
this paper, including in itself the physical sci- 
ences of astronomy, geology, and anthropology, 
and the psychical sciences of psychology, so- 
ciology, and theology. This will be our map of 
science, spread out before us with its bounded 
provinces and its known and unknown regions. 



Celestial 

and 

Terrestrial. 



Abstract Sciences. 


Concrete Sciences. 




Religious. 


Theology. \ 




Social. 


Sociology. ( 


. Psychical 


Individual. 


Psychology. ) 




J Organical. 


Anthropology. ] 




Chemical. 


Geology. 


- Physical 


Mechanical. 


Astronomy. J 





Assuming, as the result of a course of in- 
ductive logic (which cannot here be detailed), 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 63 

that reason and revelation are the two great 
factors of knowledge, we shall then have the 
task of devising the axioms or logical canons for 
their correlation in the different provinces of 
research which have been defined and charac- 
terized. They can only be obtained by combined 
reasoning and research, and will naturally fall 
into three classes, according as we study the 
normal, the existing, and the prospective state 
of the sciences. 

The Normal State of the Sciences. 

1. In each science reason and revelation are 
complemental factors of knowledge, the former 
discovering what the latter has not revealed 
and the latter revealing what the former can- 
not discover. 

2. In the ascending scale of the sciences the 
province of reason contracts as that of revela- 
tion expands, with the growing complexity, 
obscurity, and human importance of the sci- 
ences themselves. 

3. The joint action of reason and revelation 
throughout the sciences logically involves the 
perfectibility of knowledge or the indefinite 
expansion of science toward omniscience. 

The Existing State of the Sciences. 

1. Hypotheses and dogmas are to be formed 
by the scientist and religionist independently, 



64 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

each in his own province, and by his own 
methods. 

2. Dogmas within the province of the sci- 
entist must be tested in the same manner as 
his own hypotheses ; and hypotheses within the 
province of the religionist, in the same manner 
as his own dogmas. 

3. Conflicting hypotheses and dogmas can 
only be provisionally adjusted by exhibiting 
the problem of opinion, according as reason or 
revelation predominates in the normal scale of 
the sciences. 

The Prospective State of the Sciences. 

1. In the progress of the sciences, conflicting 
hypotheses and dogmas, by their own attritions 
and mutual corrections, pass into the theories 
and creeds accepted by both parties. 

2. This gradual conversion of the hypothet- 
ical and dogmatic into the scientific, proceeds 
in the order of the sciences, from one set of 
facts to another, from the simple to the com- 
plex, from the lower to the higher, from the 
physical through the psychical sciences. 

3. The historical goal of the whole scientific 
process, ever to be approached even if never 
attained, is the absorption of positive in ab- 
solute science or perfect knowledge. 



THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. G5 



THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE THUS HARMONIZED, 

A glimpse is enough to show us the vastness 
of the theme. Not by any one mind, not by 
any one people, not by any one age can it be 
mastered. It is the mighty argument of suc- 
cessive generations, proceeding with stately 
steps from its premises in a remote past toward 
its conclusions in a distant future. If we will 
surrender ourselves to it we can see whither it 
is carrying us, and exult in the prospect. 

In the view of Religion everything may ap- 
pear miraculous ; in the view of Science every- 
thing may appear natural ; while in the view 
of Philosophy both will only appear more and 
more consistent aspects of one and the same 
reality. Let Science, if it can, resolve the 
whole course of nature into one continuous 
process of correlate forces ; let Religion, if it 
must, exhibit that course of nature as one 
dazzling series of miracles ; a true Philosophy 
will yet behold them blending together as but 
the sure logic and even pulse of one Almighty 
Mind, ever reasoning through the whole crea- 
tion, and flushing with life all creatures. 

As yet, indeed, to us who can see but a 
speck, a span, of the two vast coinciding 
spheres, they must seem confused, dark and of- 
ten contradictory. But " there may be beings 
in the universe, whose capacities and knowl- 



66 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SCIENCES. 

edge and views may be so extensive asi that 
the whole Christian dispensation may to them 
appear natural ; as natural as the visible known 
course of things appears to us." Be that as it 
may, if we will read the future as we can read 
the past, it will not seem incredible that the 
most extreme investigators are now but grop- 
ing through the darkness toward some central 
point where, at length, they shall meet as in 
a focus of light. Only, we may be sure, they 
will meet there, not like those two rash knights 
at their first encounter, not like those eager 
champions w r ho are now filling the air with 
challenges and criminations, but rather like ex- 
hausted and bleeding warriors, after having 
fought their way into a recognition of each 
other's truth and virtue, to clasp hands as friends 
who had but mistaken themselves for foes. 



SYNOPSIS. 67 



SYNOPSIS- 
HisTORiCAL Origin op the Schism between Re- 
ligion and Science. 

Consequent Existing State of the Sciences : 
Numerous Unsolved Problems ; 
Scientific Hypotheses and Religious Dogmas. 
Problems in Astronomy, with Hypotheses and 
Dogmas : 

Primitive Evolution of Suns and Planets ; 

Instantaneous Creation of the Heavens. 

Plurality of Uninhabited Worlds ; 

Hierarchy of the Heavenly Hosts. 

Ultimate Dissolution of Planets and Suns ; 

Miraculous Renewal of the Heavens and Earth. 
Problems in Geology, with Hypotheses and Dog- 
mas: 

Secular Formation of Strata, Floras, and Faunas ; 

Successive Creations in Six Days. 

Ultimate Cooling of the Globe ; 

Predicted Renovation by Fire. 

Periodic Changes of Climate and Species ; 

Judgments of the Deluge and the Conflagration. 
Problems in Anthropology, with Hypotheses and 
Dogmas : 

Development of Animal into Human Species ; 

Creation of Adam in the Divine Image. 

Gradual Rise of Races, Languages,* and Arts ; 

Miraculous Confusion and Dispersion at Babel. 

! Physical Decline of the Future Human Race ; 
Predicted Renewal of Man with the Earth. 
Problems in the Psychical Sciences : Psychology', 
Sociology, and Theology: 

( Production and Dissolution of the Mind ; 
( Creation and Regeneration of the Soul. 



68 SYNOPSIS. 

Natural Growth and Decay of Societies ; 
Supernatural Career of the Church. 
Progressive Scale of Natural Religions ; 
Predicted Triumph of Revealed Religion. 
Problems in Metaphysical Science : 

Phenomenal Nature of Mind and Matter ; 
Pre-ordained Harmony of Soul and Body, 
f Development of the World from Absolute Reason 
I and Force ; 
] Creation of the World by the Father through 
(^ the Son. 
Problems in the Science of the Sciences : 

Destruction of Theology by Positive Science ; 
Rectification of Science by a Divine Revelation. 
The Goal of Science in Absolute Nescience ; 
The Beatific Vision and New Apocalypse. 
Philosophical Nature of all these Problems : 
They are not exclusively Scientific ; 
They are not exclusively Religious ; 
They are partly Scientific and partly Religious. 
Professor Tyndall's Illustration of one of these 
Problems : 

Renewed Argument of Bishop Butler ; 
Rejoinder of a Lucretian ; 
Lord Bacon as Umpire. 
The Umpirage of Philosophy between Science and 
Religion. 

Definition of Philosophy ; 
Philosophy the Accepted Umpire ; 
Philosophy the only Available Umpire ; 
Philosophy the one Desirable Umpire. 
The Final Philosophy to be sought in the Logi- 
cal Reconciliation of Science and Religion. 
The True Philosophical Spirit : 

It intrudes neither into Science nor into Religion ; 
It mediates by no mere visible Authority ; 
It is itself only recruited from the ranks of both 
Science and Religion. 



SYNOPSIS. 69 

A Philosophical Scheme for Harmonizing Science 
and Revealed Religion: 

The Sciences inductively Classified. 

The Normal State of the Sciences. 

The Existing State of the Sciences. 

The Prospective State of the Sciences. 
The Future of Knowledge thus Harmonized. 



POPULAR AND STANDARD WORKS 

PUBLISHED BY 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

In 1874. 



AGASSIZ'S (PROF. LOUIS) Structure of Animal Life. " m Illus. 8vo $1.50 

BIBLE COMMENTARY. Vol. IV. Embracing Job, Psalms, Proverbs, 

Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. 8vo 5.00 

BLAOKIE'S (PROF. J. S.) Self-Culture. i6mo. Fifth Thousand 1.00 

BUSHNELL'S (DR. H.) Forgiveness and Law. i2mo 1.75 

THE BRIC-A-BRAC SERIES. Edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. 

1. Chorley, Planche, and Young. 2. Thackeray and Dickens. 3. Meri- 
mee, Lamartine, and Sand. 4. Barham, Harness, and Hodder. 5. The 
Greville Memoirs. 6. Personal Reminiscences by Moore and Jerdan. 
7. Personal Reminiscences by Cornelia Knight and Thomas Raikes. 

Each 1 vol. Square 1 21A0. Cloth 1.50 

CHRISTLIEB'S (PROF. THEO.) Modern Doubt and Christian Belief. 8vo. 3.00 
CURTIUS' (PROF. DR. ERNST) History of Greece. Vol. IV. and Vol. V. 

Completing the Work, with Index. Crown 8vo. Each 2.50 

DODGE'S (MRS. MARY MAPES) Rhymes and Jingles. Illustrated. 

Square i2mo 3.00 

EPOCHS OF HISTORY. 1. The Era of the Protestant Revolution. 2. 

The Crusades. 3. The Thirty Years' War, 1618—1648. 4. The Houses 

of Lancaster and York. Each one vol. i6mo, with outline Maps. Price, 

per vol. in cloth 1.1x1 

FBOTJDE'S English in Ireland in 18th Century. Vols. II. and III. Com- 

i pie ting the Work. Crown 8vo. Each 2.50 

HODGE'S (DR. CHAS.) What is Darwinism ? i2mo 1.50 

HOLLAND'S (DR. J. G.) Mistress of the Manse. A Poem, wmo 1.50 

HURST'S (DR. J. F.) Life and Literature in the Fatherland. Crown 8vo ... 2.25 
LANGE'S COMMENTARY. The Minor Prophets. Revelation. Job. 

Edited by Dr. P. Schaff. 8vo. Each 5.00 

MARCOY'S Travels in South America. Profusely Illustrated. 2 vols.... 15.00 

MARSH (G. P. ) The Earth as Modified by Human Acti#i. 8vo 4.50 

MULLER, (PROF. MAX) On Missions. 8vo 1.00 

MURRAY'S (PROF. A. S.) Manual of Mythology. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 2.25 

PARKER'S (DR. JOSEPH) The Paraclete. 8vo 2.00 

ROGERS' (HEN RY) Superhuman Origin of the Bible. i2mo 2.00 

SAINTINE'S (X. B.) Myths of the Rhyne. Illustrated by G. Dore. Quarto.io.oo 
STANLEY'S (H. M.) How I Found Livingstone. A New and Cheap 

Edition 3. 50 

TORREYS (PROF. JOSEPH) Theory of Fine Art. i2mo 1.50 

VAN OOSTERZEE'S (DR. J. J.) Christian Dogmatics. 2 vols. 8vo 6.00 

VERNE'S (JULES) Meridiana. Illustrated. i2mo. Cloth. Eleventh Thou- 
sand. 75c. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Illustrated. i2mo. 
Cloth. 75c. Floating City and Blockade Runners. Illustrated. 12010. 
Cloth. Fourth Thousand. $3.00. Mysterious Island, Wrecked in the Air. 
Illustrated. i2mo. Cloth. Thirteenth Thousand. 60c. Stories of Adventure 
(Comprising " Meridiana," and " Journey to the Centre of the Earth.") 

Cheap Edition. Illustrated. i2mo. Cloth 1.50 

WHITNEY'S (PROF. W. D.) Oriental and Linguistic Studies. Second 

Series. Crown 8vo 2.5c 

WOOLS EY'S (DR. T. D.) International Law. New Edition. Crown 8vo.. . . 2.50 
*** Any of the above books sent pre-paid to any address upon receipt of the prict 
by the Publishers. 



An Important Historical Series. 



EPOCHS OF HISTORY. 

EDITED BY 

EDWARD E. MORRIS, M. A., 



Each 1 vol. 16mo. with Outline Maps. Price per volume, in cloth, $1.00. 

TTISTORIES of countries are rapidly becoming so numerous that it is 
-*J- almost impossible for the most industrious student to keep pace with 
them. Such works are, of course, still less likely to be mastered by those of 
limited leisure. It is to meet the wants of this very numerous class of 
readers that the Epochs of History has been projected. The series will 
comprise a number of compact, handsomely printed manuals, prepared by 
thoroughly competent hands, each volume complete in itself, and sketching 
succinctly the most important epochs in the world's history, always making 
the history of a nation subordinate to this more general idea. No attempt 
will be made to recount all the events of any given period. The aim will be 
to bring out in the clearest light the salient incidents and features of each 
epoch. Special attention will be paid to the literature, manners, state of 
knowledge, and all those characteristics which exhibit the life of a people as 
well as the policy of their rulers during any period. To make the text more 
readily intelligible, outline maps will be given with each volume, and where 
this arrangement is desirable they will be distributed throughout the text so 
as to be more" easy of reference. A series of works based upon this general 
plan can not fail to be widely useful in popularizing history as science has 
lately been popularized. Those who have been discouraged from attempting 
more ambitious works because of their magnitude, will naturally turn to 
these Epochs of History to get a general knowledge of any period ; students 
may use them to great advantage in refreshing their memories and in keeping 
the true perspective of tvents, and in schools they will be of immense service 
as text books, — a point which shall be kept constantly in view in their pre- 
paration. 

THE FOLLOWING VOLUMES ARE NOW READY; 

THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. By F. Seebohm, Author of 

u The Oxford Reformers — Colet, Erasmus, More," with appendix by Prof. Guo. P. 

Fisher, of Yale College. Author of " HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION." 
The CRUSADES. By Rev. G. W. Cox, M.A., Author of the " History of Greece." 
The THIRTY YEARS' WAR, 1613-1648. By Samuel Rawson Gardiner. 
THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK; with the CONQUEST and LOSS 

of FRANCE. By James Gairdner of the Public Record Office. Now ready. 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND FIRST EMPIRE: an Historical Sketch. 

By William O'Connor Morris, with an appendix by Hon. Andrew D. White, 

President of Cornell University. 

9&- Copies sent post-paid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



r«X 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




000157722 c m 




i 



IS 

1 



